


fire walk with me

by dinosaurchestra



Category: The Beginner's Guide (Video Game)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-21
Updated: 2019-11-21
Packaged: 2021-02-18 12:28:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21511060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dinosaurchestra/pseuds/dinosaurchestra
Summary: Coda, like his games, is never fully tangible in Davey’s dreams.
Relationships: Coda/Davey Wreden (The Beginner's Guide)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 15





	fire walk with me

Coda, like his games, is never fully tangible in Davey’s dreams.

He grasps at Coda, hollowly, (like he always did, hovering over the programmer’s shoulder,  _ none of these make much sense.  _ They did. They _ all  _ did.) always missing him and the point. He will be begging on his knees on that wood - panelled stage, falling between those rectangular shards of reality, sitting apart from Coda on that couch locked away from the blue. When I am around you, I am physically ill. His subconscious torments him, and Coda is always fevered when he closes his eyes. 

Davey doesn’t know if Coda knows about The Beginner’s Guide. It’s probably for the best, considering how his previous parable is in retrospect a horrible parody of their relationship. (A viewer, horrified by a metaphysical call for help that never existed.) Davey checks his email, rereads the anonymous extension that accompanied the Tower. He holds out for a message from Coda, when he tidies his kitchen alone at night, when he wanders past a streetlight in Central Park, when he goes to bed and stares at his dark, dark door. 

He will never have enough time to make up. He feels trapped in the past.

Maybe it’s because he projected on Coda so much that Coda speaks for him — Davey opens his mouth and Coda’s soft whisper of an alto murmurs, mutters, screams. A commentary in the red room, the curtains brick and the chevron flat grey Source texture. Sometimes, his legs will bend back, but he’s always walking backwards. Davey wants to hear Coda voice his own opinion, separate, his own unique individual that retreated because of Davey. He replays the game files, partly because it’s like having a conversation with Coda. Spends too much time lingering in that house, wondering if he tucks himself under the undone bedsheets Coda will meet him there.

_ Christ, _ Davey dreams about the what ifs all the time. He drowns in his room, alone, replicating Coda in his every movement, whimsy, hoping that if he just stops breathing Coda will _ come up, come back to me, I never meant to make you leave. I didn’t understand. _ A recent resurgence of colleagues dragging Davey outside when he has been in the dark for too long, and he understands all too well. He wishes that had been the same with Coda. He is out of season, out of apologies. 

He rots, like he thought Coda was. He’d tried to be a lifeguard and ended up smothering him.

Most frequently, when he sees him when he goes to sleep, Coda is dressed in a grey shirt, black pants, the same clothes that Davey had seen him in at the game jam. He stands atop the column that houses the room of game concepts, and Davey is standing at the base of the staircase, slowing down whenever he ever gets Coda.

“Come up,” Davey calls, “Come back to me.”

and suddenly they’re in that prison room, and Coda is sucking in the diseased breaths associated with illness, and Davey is running his hands through his hair. In a rare, unreal occasion, they are intimate. Trying to speak. Nothing comes out but the Tower’s stream of consciousness.  _ You desperately need something and I cannot give it to you,  _ and suddenly Davey’s the one hiccuping, trying to block out the sobs in his throat, and Coda stares at him while reality around them eclipses. 

Davey doesn’t have any thoughts. None of them make much sense.

**Author's Note:**

> bit the bullet, played the beginner's guide, & now im rdy to cry over these two :') have a ficlet


End file.
